Chapter 5

Chapter 5

Later, Shi Wan admitted that she had planned everything that day, using the opportunity to ask me out.

After we started dating, she would curl up in my arms and smile like a little fox. “The moment you agreed that day, I knew you’d never escape my grasp.”

“Ah Yu,” she had said. “I liked you from the very first moment I saw you.”

By the time Zhou Lian’s car pulled up to my apartment building, the rain had subsided significantly.

She opened her umbrella to help me out of the car and walked me to the entrance.

“By the way, if you really are breaking up with her, it’ll be awkward to keep working at her company.”

“You can come to me.”

She pulled a business card from her pocket.

I reached out to take it. “Is this an attempt to poach your friend’s talent?”

Zhou Lian’s expression was perfectly composed. “Setting everything else aside, your professional capabilities are exceptional. You’d be a prize anywhere; I’d rather put in my reservation early.”

Before I could respond, Shi Wan’s voice suddenly came from behind me, sounding somewhat cold:

“He won’t be going.”

Caught red-handed poaching a friend’s employee from behind her back.

Not that it mattered; I wasn’t the one who should feel awkward.

Zhou Lian smiled, didn’t bother responding to her, and turned back to her car.

Shi Wan gripped my wrist, her nails digging into my skin.

My limbs were ice-cold; the only heat I felt was where she held me.

The veins in my temples throbbed, and my head felt like it was splitting open.

I looked at Shi Wan and said earnestly:

“Let’s break up.”

“No.”

She refused immediately, without a second thought.

Shi Wan’s expression was grim, her brows tightly knit. “Is it because of Chu Kuo?”

“He’s leaving tomorrow. You don’t have to do this because of him…”

Her voice seemed to drift in and out.

My head felt like it was going to explode, and I no longer had the energy to argue with her.

A split second before I lost consciousness, I saw a blurred silhouette rushing toward me.

So familiar.

It made me subconsciously blur out:

“Song…”

Perhaps it was the rain combined with the biting wind.

My health had never been particularly robust, and I came down with a fever almost instantly.

When I woke up the next day, I heard Shi Wan on the phone.

“I’m sorry, something came up today…”

“…He’s sick, I need to take care of him…”

A heavy drowsiness washed over me again.

I drifted back into a daze as someone replaced the towel on my forehead.

I had no idea how much time had passed when I woke up again.

I was woken by thirst.

My throat was so dry it stung.

The towel on my head felt dry, and the high fever had sapped every ounce of strength from my body.

I tried to call out for Shi Wan, but for a long time, I couldn’t produce a single coherent sound.

She wasn’t in the room.

A glass of water sat on the edge of the nightstand.

I struggled to prop myself up to reach for it.

My limbs were weak. As I forced myself toward the edge of the bed, the duvet suddenly slipped beneath me.

I knocked over the glass, and my body slammed heavily onto the floor.

I felt like I was falling apart; everything ached. Yet, no one came to help me up.

As the fever clouded my mind and blurred my senses…

That person appeared.

She had a face that was eighty percent similar to Shi Wan’s, and when she smiled, two shallow dimples appeared at the corners of her mouth.

She called my name with a smile:

“Ah Yu.”

She said:

“You have to live a good life.”

I wanted to call her name.

But my throat was so parched and cracked that it was painful, and I couldn’t utter a single syllable.

Song An’an.

Don’t go.

Song An’an-